Many Irish over the centuries sought refuge in Liverpool, and once they arrived there didn’t go far, settling in Vauxhall near the docks or on Scotland Road. The local MP, TP O’Connor, represented Liverpool Scotland as an Irish nationalist from 1885 until his death in 1929.

In 1757, the Wide Streets Commission was set up to lay down wide modern streets which leading citizens felt were essential to a modern and prestigious city. Unfortunately Dublin was not to remain such a city for very long.

One critic has compared reading Charles Maturin’s Melmoth to climbing Mount Everest, yet the novel continues to appeal, in part perhaps because of its role in creating a genre that is still potent in global culture –in Hollywood movies, popular music and manga animation.

Book-burning is a recurring element in our cultural history, though mostly the authorities have found censorship and regulation more effective. For the people, however, a good show is always popular and great satisfaction can often be derived from the destruction of symbolic goods.

James Cousins, an early literary revival figure, fell for Gretta Gillespie. Gretta overcame an early antipathy and they married, embracing vegetarianism and theosophy, which provided a focus for enthusiasm in the absence of “some more artistic way of continuance of the race”.

Like teaching, librarianship is a profession that has long been associated with women and offered them employment opportunities when many other paths were closed off. And occasionally too they were cherished.

The prevailing culture in Dublin is one of conservation: we don't like the new or the modern, preferring the old and crumbling. So why then has there been such sentiment about the Poolbeg chimneys, symbols of an industrial era we seem to be happy to turn our backs on?

Back in 1988, in a speech in Bruges, Margaret Thatcher laid down the law to the Europeans as to how they should run their show. She did at least acknowledge, however, that Europe was something with which Britain was connected.

It is fairly well known that volunteers captured in 1916 were sometimes jeered at by crowds of working class Dubliners on their way to imprisonment. What exactly can we read into this and what does it tell us about the legitimacy of the rising?